Hmm, checked to see if CNN was reporting yet that the regime had not stood down as peacefully as all that for Festive Wednesday after all, and found this instead. I'm not making any predictions, but I find it odd that major news outlets don't seem to grok that this could be it. Much more news here (given what CNN was reporting, I figured these must be small isolated incidents or something), also about events in Syria.
Edited to add:
Brain ticking over slowly because I am, indeed, home with a cold today: Why right now? Could it be that between al Qaeda's apparent recent success in influencing Spain to withdraw from Iraq (by a highly reproducible method) and Dubya's sink in the polls vs. a quagmire-talking Democratic nominee, pro-democracy folk in the Middle East are feeling their window of opportunity closing? Moves toward democracy in the region following the conclusion of the Iraq War had been fairly slow and cautious up to now (though faster than I would have expected; I was stunned to read last month that 600,000 Syrians living in Syria had had signed a petition demanding democratic reforms, for example). I was vastly preferring slow and steady to fast and deadly. Events in Syria are getting pretty bloody already.
My friend B. said: I just talked with an Iranian coworker. Her impression was the craziness had more to do with a repressed holiday involving FIRE finally getting official recognition. Also, since it has been banned until now, all of the firecrackers are homemade. Add into that the fact that it appeals mostly to young people, and you can see how things can get out of hand. It doesn't appear that the disorder had much of a political dimension.
I replied: Well, I dunno. Throwing molotov cocktails into the homes of mullahs sounds kind of political to me. And this entire period of political unrest in Iran was ushered in by street celebrations of the victory of the Iranian soccer team over the U.S, which was not exactly inherently political in a regime-changing kind of way.